Construction planning has typically been performed manually. To the extent that any construction planning processes can be automated, they have been limited to critical path method processes where the materials, resources, and other constraints for individual tasks are modeled. However, assignment of these tasks to locations within a construction project and coordination of the tasks has been performed manually.
For example, a construction project manager may seek to start each task as soon as possible, such that when a prerequisite task is completed, the next task is initiated. While this process makes intuitive sense, the result is often that different construction teams either wait for a preceding task to be completed, or are assembled as needed every time a task is completed. Such processes introduce additional cost and delay into the construction process, but the time required to manually determine whether tasks can be scheduled based on the location in which the tasks are performed is prohibitive, because of the many variables that are typically associated with each task. For example, whether or not detail work should be performed in an area may depend on whether there are additional floors above the area where activities are being performed that require support to be provided in the lower area that would ruin the detail. As a result, the difficulty in creating a methodology for accommodating such variables has resulted in such planning being done manually, resulting in wasted assets, delay and increased costs. Likewise, because of the limited functionality of such methods, the effect of continuity of work on risk modeling and the statistical modeling of productivity and resource availability has not even been contemplated.